Gender and Social Inclusion

At the heart of everything we do

At Coffey, we actively promote gender equality and social inclusion in all our work, as part of the sector-wide effort to empower socially-marginalised groups around the world.

Promoting equal outcomes is not only the smart thing to do but also the right thing to do. And Coffey’s part in achieving that is by ensuring that we design, deliver, monitor and evaluate our work in an inclusive way, while promoting diversity within our organisation and operations around the world.

Tangible commitments

We have developed a bespoke Gender marker – adapted from the OECD-DAC Gender Marker - to ensure all our work is gender-sensitive at a minimum, in line with our institutional commitment. Our Gender and Social Inclusion analysis guides our teams throughout the project management cycle to ensure programmes identify the constraints and opportunities faced by different groups.

An inclusive approach to MEL

Our Evaluation and Research team is experienced in monitoring and evaluating aid programmes that advance gender equality and social inclusion. We are a trusted partner in delivering inclusive evaluations across a range of areas, including education, economic empowerment and agriculture, and in measuring programme impacts on marginalised groups through complex evaluations.

Expert advisory services

Our in-house Gender Team provides advisory support to a range of Coffey programmes. It is a cross-practice team made up of over 20 gender specialists from across the company with a range of sectoral experience, including economic empowerment, market development, violence against women and girls, conflict and peacebuilding and inclusive evaluation and research.

Our Gender Team promotes best practice across all our work

We recognise that equality is a human right and we strive to actively champion best practice across Coffey. Our Gender Team brings together gender specialists from across the business to share best practice in gender mainstreaming and socially-transformative programming.

The team is our go-to network of in-house gender experts who share and promote best practice, provide bespoke tools for gender and social inclusion analysis, and build staff capacity. Our team ensures that Coffey complies with our commitment to gender equality and meet regularly to share lessons of what works well across the company.

Streamlining best practice: Do No Harm, gender and conflict sensitivity

Understanding the differences between men, women, boys and girls in development programming is essential for preventing conflict and promoting peace, stability and prosperity.

Our comprehensive context and conflict analysis provides an in-depth understanding of key project stakeholders and the individual, community and institutional incentives that drive conflict dynamics. This allows us to identify possible dividers and connectors that can exacerbate or alleviate those dynamics.

Understanding and responding to the given contexts is at the core of our interventions. We use and adapt proven methodologies to the needs of individual programmes. We analyse how our design and activities may affect dividers and connectors and how they in turn may influence the programmes, helping to identify possible unintended consequences.

Click here to find out more about Jamii Thabiti - Improving Community Security, DFID, 2014-2018.

World-class technical expertise in gender and social inclusion

We are experienced in delivering technical advisory services in gender and social inclusion to clients including DFID, ODI and the FCO.

In 2017, Finland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs commissioned Coffey to assess whether its support to gender equality - through its development policies and programmes between 2004 and 2016 - could be evaluated. We reviewed existing evaluation studies and policy documents to understand the existing knowledge of gender equality promotion. We then highlighted gaps in existing evidence and suggested areas for further investigation, to understand how gender equality-promoting activities might be evaluated credibly and reliably.

Coffey is also supporting the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut to mainstream gender on a project that maps civil-military relations across the Middle East and North Africa. We have led workshops on mainstreaming gender in the defence sector with a range of audiences, including Carnegie’s research assistants, Transparency International and senior military officers in the Lebanese and Jordanian Armed Forces.

Market systems development: We are adept in identifying socially marginalised and vulnerable people in our project target areas. We diagnose the barriers they face in accessing markets and address systemic constraints through our projects to remove the bottlenecks to their active participation.

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